from his evidently sincere admiration for the
great man with whom he was once so
disastrously connected in business. Here is surely
an original book, in an age when originality
grows harder and harder to meet with—a book
containing disclosures which will perplex and
dismay every admirer of Balzac who cannot
separate the man from his works—a book which
presents one of the most singular records of
human eccentricity, so far as the hero of it is
concerned, and of human credulity so far as the
biographer is concerned, which has probably
ever been published for the amusement and
bewilderment of the reading world.

The title of this singular work is, Portrait
Intime De Balzac: sa Vie, son Humeur et son
Caractère. Par Edmond Werdet, son ancien
Libraire-Editeur. Before, however, we allow
Monsieur Werdet to relate his own personal
experience of the celebrated writer, it will be
advisable to introduce the subject by giving an
outline of the struggles, the privations, and the
disappointments which marked the early life of
Balzac, and which, doubtless, influenced for the
worse his after-character. These particulars are
given by Monsieur Werdet in the form of an
episode, and are principally derived, on his part,
from information afforded by the author's sister.

Honoré de Balzac was born in the city of
Tours, on the sixteenth of May, seventeen
hundred and ninety-nine. His parents were people
of rank and position in the world. His father
held a legal appointment in the council-chamber
of Louis the Sixteenth. His mother was the
daughter of one of the directors of the public
hospitals of Paris. She was much younger than
her husband, and brought him a rich dowry.
Honoré was her first-born; and he retained
throughout life his first feeling of childish
reverence for his mother. That mother suffered
the unspeakable affliction of seeing her
illustrious son taken from her by death at the age of
fifty years. Balzac breathed his last in the kind
arms which had first caressed him on the day of
his birth.

His father, from whom he evidently inherited
much of the eccentricity of his character, is
described as a compound of Montaigne,
Rabelais, and Uncle Toby—a man in manners,
conversation, and disposition generally, of the
quaintly original sort. On, the breaking out of
the Revolution, he lost his court situation, and
obtained a place in the commissariat department
of the army of the North. This appointment
he held for some years. It was of the greater
importance to him, in consequence of the change
for the worse produced in the pecuniary
circumstances of the family by the convulsion of
the Revolution.

At the age of seven years Balzac was sent to
the college of Vendôme; and for seven years
more there he remained. This period of his life
was never a pleasant one in his remembrance.
The reduced circumstances of his family
exposed him to much sordid persecution and
ridicule from the other boys; and he got on but
little better with the masters. They reported
him as idle and incapable—or, in other words,
as ready enough to devour all sorts of books on
his own desultory plan, but hopelessly obstinate
in resisting the educational discipline of the
school. This time of his life he has reproduced
in one of the strangest and the most mystical of
all his novels, La Vie Intellectuelle de Louis
Lambert.

On reaching the critical age of fourteen, his
intellect appears to have suffered under a species
of eclipse, which occurred very suddenly and
mysteriously, and the cause of which neither his
masters nor the medical men were able to explain.
He himself always declared in after-life, with a
touch of his father's quaintness, that his brain
had been attacked by "a congestion of ideas."
Whatever the cause might be, the effect was so
serious that the progress of his education had to
be stopped; and his removal from the college
followed as a matter of course. Time, care,
quiet, and breathing his native air, gradually
restored him to himself; and he was ultimately
enabled to complete his studies at two private
schools. Here again, however, he did nothing
to distinguish himself among his fellow-pupils.
He read incessantly, and preserved the fruits of
his reading with marvellous power of memory;
but the school-teaching, which did well enough
for ordinary boys, was exactly the species of
teaching from which the essentially original
mind of Balzac recoiled in disgust. All that he
felt and did at this period has been carefully
reproduced by his own pen in the earlier pages of
Le Lys dans la Vallée.

Badly as he got on at school, he managed to
imbibe a sufficient quantity of conventional
learning to entitle him, at the age of eighteen,
to his degree of Bachelor of Arts. He was
destined for the law; and after attending the
legal lectures in the various Institutions of Paris,
he passed his examination by the time he was
twenty, and then entered a notary's office in the
capacity of clerk. There were two other clerks
to keep him company, who hated the drudgery
of the law as heartily as he hated it himself.
One of them was the future author of The
Mysteries of Paris, Eugène Sue; the other was
the famous critic, Jules Janin.

After he had been engaged in this office, and
in another, for more than three years, a legal
friend, who was under great obligations to Balzac
the father, offered to give up his business as a
notary to Balzac the son. To the great scandal
of the family, Honoré resolutely refused the
offer. His reason was that he had determined to
be the greatest writer in France. His relations
began by laughing at him, and ended by growing
angry witli him. But nothing moved Honoré.
His vanity was of the calm, settled sort; and
his own conviction that his business in life was
simply to be a famous man proved too strong to
be shaken by anybody.

While he and his family were at war on this
point, a change for the worse occurred in the
elder Balzac's official circumstances. He was
superannuated. The diminution of income thus